Aperi Animam and Danceworks Performance MKE Embody Secular and Sacred Concerns

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Photo by Mark Frohna

Danceworks and Aperi Animam “Dixit Dominus and Cantos”

Danceworks and Aperi Animam “Dixit Dominus and Cantos”

Calvary Presbyterian Church on Wisconsin Avenue and Ninth Street provided a rich and provocative setting for a double bill of George Friderik Handel’s Dixit Dominus and an original medley of five polyphonic songs titled Cantos, all performed by the outstanding early music choir Aperi Animam. Combining compositions from the Renaissance to the present, Cantos looks to nature and community for joy, and to Christianity for peace and eternal rest. Handle’s masterwork is a musical dramatization of the Biblical promise made by the Lord God to an earthly lord that “I will make thine enemies thy footstool.”

The old style, high-ceilinged church proper is visually and acoustically beautiful. The audience was seated on three sides of the wide center space which, I’d guess, had once held pews. The choir stood in a single line on the higher platform where services were conducted. For the Dixit Dominus, a six-member string orchestra and an organist assembled at the foot of the raised area. Conductor Paul Thompson worked from the audience’s level, so the singers were in full view. The musical performance was constantly brilliant.

The church’s open central area provided the dance floor for 12 performers from Danceworks Performance MKE. These excellent artists brought world premieres by artistic director Christal Wagner (Dixit Dominus) and guest choreographer Maria Gillespie (Cantos) to full life. The physical arrangement kept dancers close to the audience, always a blessing. As sunset lighting through the stainedglass windows darkened, designer Colin Gawronski gently enriched the room’s glow and color with theatrical light, shifting mood and focus as needed.

Cantos opened the concert. To my astonishment, the choir and its numerous soloists performed the entire five song series a capella, beginning with the complicated, wordless, avant-garde Dawn by the contemporary American composer/singer/dancer Meredith Monk. It was gorgeous music, perfect for a church, with sustained lower notes against flitting strings of high notes like first light breaking. 

Playful Dance

The dancers were waiting as if asleep on the dance floor’s edge, all but Isaac Robertson, soon joined by Ashley Ray Garcia, who together awakened the other 10. I saw the dancers as another choir, a movement choir, addressing life through movement. As the singers segued into a lively 13th century round titled sumer is icumin in, about cuckoo birds cuckooing joy over summer’s arrival, the engaging dancing grew playful. The end had the cast in a communal clump.

The choir segued to Ergen Deda, a fast-paced 14th century Bulgarian folk song about an old unmarried guy who chases village girls, and the one who doesn’t run. Gina Laurenzi began a sensuous solo and was soon respectfully partnered by Cuauhtli Ramirez Castro. Robertson and Katelyn Altmann formed a second tender partnership. These four heroic dancers brought us to the sacred realm of Ave donna santissima, a 14th century hymn to the Virgin Mary who, the lyrics say, received the fetal Jesus like glassware receives sunshine. The lighting darkened for the final song, Nunc Dimittus, a Biblical text set to stirring music by the contemporary American composer Paul Smith. It’s a prayer for a peaceful death and for the soul’s salvation. All distinction between sacred and secular dissolved in the singing and dancing. It was just, in a word, beautiful.

Dixit Dominus was the concert’s raison d’etre. Handel composed it 1707 at the age of 22. The music is vocally demanding, and performances are rare. Aperi Animam co-founder and production designer Jackie Willis invited Wagner to create dance for it because “it called for something more than just delivering music,” as she wrote in a program note, adding that it’s power “lends to out of the ordinary articulations of the complexities of human existence.” 

Wagner’s choreography was driven by the Baroque era music, but the consciousness was very 2024. Although largely abstract in style, it leaned toward theatre dancing. There was a story in it. Ramirez Castro gave a fine performance as an introspective fellow who is somehow led (by three “Muses of Discipline”) to think beyond his insecurities, but to a military vision. He becomes a drill sergeant in a war that only he, of all his company, survives. The carnage crushes him. In sorrow then, he’s drawn (by “Fate”) toward what might be a quiet end. 

Handel’s finale is too grand for that. Everyone is somehow back alive and in a hugely energetic celebration. Ramirez Castro’s dancing grew more acrobatic and balletic. The story closes with our central figure humbled in the face of so much more than he can understand. 

Dixit Dominus translates as “the Lord said.” The closing text is “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” Make of it what you will. I remember the footstools.